Brit Black Friday: A Black Day(s)?

Not long until Little Saint Nick does his thing now, but before that happens, there will be the usual scramble to clear inventory, at full price, ahead of the mid-January dog days. And here in the U.K., hope springs eternal.

We may have Brexit to contend with (less about putting the “Great” back into Great Britain and rather more to do with taking us straight back to the 1950s), we may have lackluster leaders, and yes, we now have Black Friday. And for this, we have to you to blame.

As a U.K. tradition, Black Friday is in its infancy. It’s only really taken off here in the last three years or so. Which means that it’s not about celebrating the end of Thanksgiving by going shopping with retailers responding by offering discounts. On a point of protocol, we don’t actually have anything remotely resembling Thanksgiving here in the U.K., and what has in fact happened is the marketing folk, in a moment of trans-Atlantic madness, have thought “if it works over there, why can’t we make it work back home”?

This is an old-fashioned promotion. Nothing is marked, and instead the moment in the retail calendar when the red pen is applied to merchandise is brought forward by about a month. In effect, this is about a sea of red banners across stores for a week with people buying holiday gifts at a price less than might otherwise have been the case a few years back.

As a commercial phenomenon, it’s fine. As a reason for festive jollity, forget it. Once more, the moneymen have had their way. Maybe this is something around which tradition will be wrapped, but it’s probably more set to become just another point when we huddle around the festive markdown tray. For a week or so, stores will be a mess and then it will be Santa, reindeer, holly, etc., all the way to the big day.

Black Friday seems right in the U.S., not so much across the Pond.    

John Ryan is a journalist covering the retail sector, a role he has fulfilled for more than a decade. As well as being the European Editor of VMSD magazine, he writes for a broad range of publications in the U.K., the U.S. and Germany with a focus on in-store marketing, display and layout, as well as the business of store architecture and design. In a previous life, he was a buyer for C&A, based in London and then Düsseldorf, Germany. He lives and works in London.